Talk-Polywell.org

You're speaking to one guy who knew that. If you doubt it you can ask Ray Ozzie. He was around when Steve Freyder and I were doing the 8086 emulator just down the hall from his office, precisely because we foresaw it in 1978. Well I was there too. Just not quite as close. I designed the I/O for the...

The day IBM ships Gates MS DOS as the default OS on its 4.77MHz 8088 PC, the government receives $1B deposited in escrow at the short term treasury rate, from some savvy bidders in Portland, OR who A) understand Gates' rent-seeking game and B) have purchased the rights to Intel's RMX86 real time OS...

And you are wrong about MS-DOS under this regime: Almost immediately the copyright would have transferred to those in whom investors were most confident that they could create a superior operating system -- one whose value derived not simply from the position as gatekeeper to the liquid value of Mo...

It's really pretty simple: In a state of nature, people acquire animal territory -- enough for replacement rate fecundity . That's virtually a tautology given a fixed carrying capacity. To acquire more elaborate properties , people enter into social contracts called governments. One of the key feat...

In what way is the government's basic service of upholding property rights more directly related to income, sales and/or value added than it is to the liquidation value of an owner's estate sans his homestead (which he has a right and responsibility to armed self-defense with or without government)?...

If nothing else the government can make the assessment be based on someone bidding for the asset by placing the full amount of the bid into escrow as short term treasuries -- a bid that the owner can accept at any time. Then you tie up capital in government bonds instead of deploying it productivel...

I like taxing profits... Profits are somewhat less subjective. The problem there, is how much of those profits can be attributed to the essentially risk free "economic rent" collected by the owner? The "subjectivity" of that is where pathologies like Bill Gates arise. You have to do the same net pr...

I am not completely certain I understand what you mean about taxing property as opposed to economic activity. It's really pretty simple: In a state of nature, people acquire animal territory -- enough for replacement rate fecundity. That's virtually a tautology given a fixed carrying capacity. To a...

BTW path dependence is a feature of a lot of things. Evolution for instance. Thanks for the phrase "path dependence" which I hadn't run across before, but I'll stick to my formal designation of Network Externality as a specific kind of path dependence most relevant to the Gates monopoly. It does he...

Thanks for the link, scareduck. The full text of the article is apparently freely available. Holmes, if you have something to say in response to my substantive criticism of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's investment in malaria treatment then say it. My generalization about young women is tru...

Bill Gates does have his good points. He (with IBM's help) unified operating systems at a time when there was a lot of confusion in the market.. You give him too much credit. The market unified operating systems. You're basically correct. As someone who was developing an 8086 operating system from ...

Do you have a link to his rebuttal? Is it as different from Bussard's as is his device?

PS:

scareduck wrote:the original poster didn't specify that it was. (philanthropy -- JAB)

As long as we're in the nits:

...Wealthy individuals donate a huge amount of money to crap...

Two, Gates and Paul Allen have already invested in Tri Alpha Energy , which is using a field-reversed approach advocated by Norman Rostoker of UCI (and others). One can cut Gates and Allen some slack on this, however it doesn't detract from my statement about philanthropy. It would have been philan...

Well... at least some of the money goes to research grants to find ways to combat diseases like AIDS and Malaria. That's not "Science and Technology" with long-term effects? 1) Ever heard of "carrying capacity"? 2) The "cure" for malaria is known and has been put into practice in the US since the N...

Understand that philanthropy is about little more than social status and social status is pretty much limited to that which appeals to young women as morally superior. If you could get Hollywood to make a lot more movies like Tucker, you might get somewhere. As it stands, however, Gates and the like...